John French’s Lula and His Politics of Cunning is required reading for those who wish to understand Brazilian politics since the 1960s. It is also a key contribution to the literature on Latin American history in general, and leadership politics in particular. French’s rigorous analysis of former Brazilian president Lula’s trajectory throughout more than half a century of history not only enables us to understand what happened in the past, but also provides key insights to understand the current challenges Brazilian democracy faces.
The first chapters are particularly rich and enthralling, as French takes us to the rapidly changing world of the mid-twentieth-century Brazilian working class. As French himself explains, the book pays close attention to the first half of Lula’s life, which offers, he argues, the key to understanding how Lula became a key global political figure (2). That explains why there is much more emphasis in this volume on the period up to the 1980s than on the period after he rose to the presidency (which has received most of the attention in the literature).
French’s work thus fills an important gap in our understanding about the emergence of a leader. It shows us how a shy and apolitical young man became one of the world’s most important and charismatic political actors. It is a truly inspirational story, because there is nothing predetermined in Lula’s trajectory. As the author argues, this unique and improbable trajectory was a product of the political and economic context, the networks of relationships in which he was embedded, and his own personal attributes. The title of the book, Lula’s “politics of cunning,” is a result of all of these factors and of the concrete challenges that Lula, his family, and his coworkers had to face between the 1960s and the 1980s.
The analysis of Lula’s roots and, more specifically, the relevance of his experience as a union leader in his trajectory helps in making sense of key recent events in Brazilian history. It allows us to understand why, on the eve of being jailed, in April 2018, Lula decided to sleep on a mattress on the floor of the São Bernardo metalworkers’ union headquarters, and why, when released from jail, he went back to the same place. He had not been a union leader for many decades, but São Bernardo remained a symbol of his impressive resilience and adaptational prowess.
Lula’s Demise
However, because John French’s book focuses mostly on discussing the period in which Lula enjoyed increasing levels of popularity and became a global icon of the left, readers will find little to explain the increased levels of criticism—and indeed, hatred—that he became a target of in the following years. All of a sudden, Lula was no longer the “master of being everything to everyone” (335). In April 2018, he began to serve a prison sentence for corruption and money laundering. He was unable to run for office or even to exercise the basic right of free speech. A public opinion poll taken right after he was jailed showed that 57 percent of those interviewed believed that the president was guilty as charged, and 69 percent that he was in some way involved in corruption activities. Only 44 percent thought that Lula was being treated unjustly (Shalders Reference Shalders2018).
How was this possible, given Lula’s amazing trajectory and his politics of cunning? Why was he unable to avoid this? Why wasn’t there a massive uprising in his support?Footnote 1 In the last chapter of the book, French gives us a few tips to answer these questions. He rightly emphasizes the persecution and elite hatred for a leader who opened the doors of airplanes and universities to poor and black people. However, Lula was not only “a victim of his successes,” as the title of this last chapter implies. He was also a victim of his mistakes and of the accomplishments of others. Thus, to understand Lula’s demise, we have to consider the reasons for the diminished popular support for the Workers’ Party (PT) governments, as well as the parallel strengthening of an emergent field of right-wing grassroots activism. These interrelated processes have multiple causes that go beyond the topic of this symposium and cannot be addressed in this essay. I will focus only on two key events, which demonstrate that the PT—and Lula—progressively lost public opinion support and its hitherto hegemonic presence in the streets: the 2013 protests and the campaign to oust Lula’s successor, President Dilma Rousseff.
The cycle of protests known as the 2013 June Journeys (Jornadas de junho de 2013) caught political leaders and scholars by surprise. The largest protest wave since the Collor impeachment (1992) was triggered by an increase in transportation fares, but quickly expanded, both in terms of the list of grievances and in terms of the heterogeneity of actors that participated. Most important for our purposes in this essay is the fact that many of the protesters, especially in the first weeks of June, were ideologically close to the government. June 2013 was, at first, an expression of dissatisfaction, within the ranks of the left, with a government that still enjoyed, at that moment, high levels of public opinion support. As Alonso and Mische explain, for a new generation of progressive actors, the Workers’ Party governments were seen as unable to respond to its higher expectations, and the dissatisfaction of these actors had been growing for several years before the protests. The clear message from these sectors in 2013 was that “the PT has started to face the limits of its politics” (2016, 4).
As the cycle of protests unfolded, however, these progressive actors and their grievances became less visible, in parallel with the growing presence of a myriad of right-wing and conservative actors that changed the face of the mobilization and its meaning. Right-wing activism is not a new phenomenon, nor are right-wing values and ideas. However, about a decade before the 2013 protests, during Lula’s two terms as president, a new field of right-wing activism had begun to emerge in Brazil (Dias et al. Reference Dias, von Bülow and Gobbi2021). Student organizations, think tanks, and anticorruption movements created between 2001 and 2013 reclaimed the legitimacy of right-wing ideals and constructed common understandings about the country’s political problems and solutions. In June 2013, these actors recognized the possibilities the protests opened for channeling a diffuse but growing dissatisfaction toward a different ideological project. While the first anti-Lula protest articulations date from the first decade of the 2000s, it was in 2013 that they showed their mobilization capacity on a large scale. From then on, actors positioned to the right of the political spectrum dominated the political debate, both in the streets and in social media, which they used successfully to set the political agenda and to recruit sympathizers in the antileft (and anti-Lula) crusade that eventually led to the election of Jair Bolsonaro.Footnote 2
The second key event that helps us to understand Lula’s demise was the impeachment of President Rousseff. This was a traumatic process that divided the country and opened a crisis not only for the left (or for the Workers’ Party), but more generally, for the democratic system that had been in place since the 1988 Constitution. In the finger-pointing debates that inevitably occurred during this period in leftist circles, one argument that surfaced often was that if it were Lula— instead of Dilma—in power, the impeachment would not have occurred. The justification inevitably referred to Lula’s “politics of cunning” and the contrasting personal inability of Rousseff to engage in negotiations and consensus building. To the extent that Lula shared guilt, it was only because he was the one who had appointed Dilma as his successor. In spite of the lack of scholarship on individual leaders, which French points out in his book, this broadly accepted explanation for the crisis relied heavily on the personal traits of the first woman to achieve the country’s presidency, in comparison with Lula’s political skills.
Such explanation, however, is simplistic at best (and misogynist at worst).Footnote 3 It preserves Lula’s reputation but ignores why it was possible for Lula to appoint his successor in the first place. The ritual of dedazo is most commonly associated with successions in authoritarian contexts; for example, how Mexican presidents personally determined who would be their successor in the long years of the PRI regime. The bottom-up and participatory tradition of the Workers’ Party is very far, however, from its Mexican counterpart. That Lula was able to choose his successor without a democratic and competitive primary within the Workers’ Party says a lot about the weakening of the party’s internal life and the concentration of power around Lula.Footnote 4 Even more important, the blaming of Dilma Rousseff also ignores the fact that the corruption scandals that became the central mobilizing frame in the impeachment campaign originated in Lula’s presidencies.Footnote 5
The opposition that took to the streets in favor of the impeachment in 2015 and 2016 put Lula squarely at the center of the campaign, portraying him as the main culprit of the Brazilian crisis and as the symbol of a “corrupt elite.” An empirical analysis of the contents of Facebook posts by five key right-wing organizations that called for the protests confirms this: Lula figured prominently in the blame attribution framing, appearing often in publications more than Dilma Rousseff herself (Dias et al. Reference Dias, von Bülow and Gobbi2021, 14). Thus the campaign was not only about ousting the president. It was about defeating the Workers’ Party, and that included shattering Lula’s popularity and, more specifically, setting the stage for his imprisonment (Tatagiba Reference Tatagiba2018). In fact, one of the most important symbols in these protests, mentioned by French in his book, was a gigantic inflated doll portraying Lula in prison uniform. Calls for Lula’s imprisonment were common both in social media messages and in the streets. In March 2016, during the most dramatic episodes around the impeachment, Lula’s rejection rate reached an all-time high of 57 percent in opinion polls (Canzian 2016).
Lula’s Comeback?
Lula’s history as a political leader could have ended in April 2018, but it did not. After spending 580 days in prison, this 78-year-old man remained a political force to contend with. While we write this symposium, he is once more ahead in public opinion polls for the presidential election to be held in 2022. As French argues, Lula’s stubbornness (teimosia) and his ability to adapt help explain his phoenixlike rise from the ashes after each crisis—the humiliating experience of unemployment, the loss of his first wife and child, the first imprisonment and persecution during the military dictatorship, the corruption scandals of his first presidential mandate, and finally, being imprisoned for corruption and seeing his political project be dismantled.
Each time, a changed Lula emerged. In response to criticism of the lack of coherence, Lula has often described himself as a “walking metamorphosis” (French, 366), paraphrasing the expression used in a famous line of a song by Brazilian composer and singer Raul Seixas: “I would rather be a walking metamorphosis than have that same old opinion about everything.”Footnote 6
It remains to be seen, however, what this “walking metamorphosis” holds for the future of Brazilian democracy. What kind of leader will Lula be? I can only hope that John French will accept the challenge of answering this question in a second volume of Lula’s biography.
